


The Stories Kept Untold

by Birddi



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: College Years, Gen, Past!Unrequited - Stiles Stilinski/Lydia Martin, Stiles and Lydia - Friendship, Unrequited - Derek Hale/Stiles Stilinski
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-18
Updated: 2013-04-18
Packaged: 2017-12-08 21:16:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/766094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Birddi/pseuds/Birddi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Don’t think this is about you, Stilinski. Berkeley candidates are known to be looked at favorably by CREN.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Stories Kept Untold

Freshmen year in college is never easy, universities acknowledge this fact in a very systematic way and deal with the new student class by forcing them into groups that play ice-breaking games and artificial getting to know-you games led by overly perky upperclassmen. It’s all very standard operating procedure but this is all done in the hope that by the start of term almost everyone has a friend or at least a few acquaintances to battle homesickness or the isolation of being on one’s own for the first time. 

Stiles can appreciate that. With the unexpected familial friendships he grew to have with some of his classmates of his hometown, with the pack he inexplicably found himself a part of during his later years in high school, being in a new city, starting a new chapter of his life is intimidating. It made sense for him to choose Berkeley for their program in Culture and Myth. Just like it made sense for Scott and Issac to stay in Beacon Hills for their community college and the associated trade schools, or for Allison to pack up and run off to Paris the day after graduation, Shantel to finish her degree at beauty school, and for Boyd to start working at the local mechanic where Derek worked on the weekends. Although he wasn’t sure how, it sort of fit that it would be Lydia who followed him to Berkeley instead of taking the all-expense paid trip to M.I.T. or Stanford or some other school closer to wherever Jackson ended up at. 

“Don’t think this is about you, Stilinski. Berekeley candidates are known to be looked at favorably by CREN.”

Stiles would buy that argument if Lydia hadn’t also pulled the Administrative Advisors to heel in the first week and gotten Stiles’ schedule rearranged to match up more with Lydia’s even though that meant Stiles had to wake up at six in the morning every Tuesday and Thursday to be on time for a class he wasn’t thrilled about. He won’t ever say it to her face but he thought Lydia wanted to hang on to the feeling of pack as much as Stile’s did.

-

There is a vast majority of students going ‘O-M-G, why did I think an Ivy League school was a good idea’ and others equally excited about the freedom of being away from parents and the keggers around campus as being able to put Magna Cum Laude on their degree in a few years. Stiles likened his experience so far to being a little bit like the supporting cast in Legally Blonde. He’s made some friends, kept up with the people back home, and thought a bit idly about joining a fraternity. Scott had made a half disgusted sound and a ‘but dude, why?’ when Stile’s mentioned it over one of their Skype dates. 

Even so, Stiles is just glad he took AP and had tested out of a majority of his Gen Eds. Of course, that led to him taking an advanced level Astronomy class with Lydia and a whole bunch of upperclassmen with things like Objected-Oriented Programing and Vector Analysis in their Major or showed clear ambitions for world domination. If pushed, he’d admit that the majority of the class was straight out of the Revenge of the Nerds cast minus the humor or good taste in geek culture. How no one in a crowd of seventy students understood his Dr.Who graphic tee was a mystery. He may have mentioned his body snatching theory to Derek, once. It was an ill-advised drunk phone call. He knows better now, there’s even an AP to prevent all future drunk dials should Stiles forget and want to discuss the sexual nature of Little Red Riding Hood and the universal attraction to werewolf stubble. 

There was only one other student who didn’t wear pen protectors like badges and who coincidentally had a perpetual lost looking expression; it was just Lydia and himself. Stiles took odds that the stoned looking surfer who hid in the back row was forced into this class due in part to a last minute graduation requirement or had wandered into the wrong classroom a few weeks ago and hadn’t yet realized it. Apparently, that was a thing that happened. 

While Professor Azarov was nowhere near as sexy as Luke Wilson, Stiles related to the man’s occasional bouts of clumsiness but remained mostly ambivalent through his lectures on Born’s rule and celestial mechanics. Stiles understood the topic to a decent degree and while he found it interesting enough to learn the particulars after an all-night wiki binge it wasn’t really his core academic interest. Lydia was another matter entirely, and while she adored the subject matter had brewed a stubborn dislike of the man since the beginning of the semester. The first day the man had the audacity to take in Lydia’s color coordinated computer and shoes and ask if she needed directions to the correct class and if the majority of her mathematically gifted peer group thought the same they were far too intimidated by her perfectly styled hair and dagger sharp six inch stilettos to mention it her. Social hierarchy, he was finding, transcended high school. 

It was far too early to sit through a class decaffeinated but Stiles had managed to make it on time by foregoing his morning tribute to Starbucks, as such he stared bleary eyed at what he thought was the visual representation of the Quantum Field Theory in curved spacetime drawn on the chalk board and tried to make sense of what he was hearing. 

It took him a few seconds longer than it should have but it dawned on him eventually that his class notes were missing. To his left, Lydia was scribbling violently in his beat up spiral notebook with its margins cluttered with cartoon scribbles and loopy designs. He watched his own designs slowly move about the page and idly wondered how it was that other people never noticed that shit.  
“What are you doing?” Stiles finally asked; chin propped up by his hand.

Lydia’s mathematical equation was legible and he sort of got that she was doing something that involved event horizons but an espresso or twelve would be of great assistance at times like this.  
It was a 50-50 chance that she’d actually answer him but he was used to that. In a low tone, “He misdrew that and I’m explaining how.” 

He stared at the equation than back at the board and tried to see what she was. Math didn’t come to him as easy as breathing as it did her and not for the first time he wondered about his agreement to be in this class rather than one on the cross-cultural mythos of the Pacific that started at a reasonable time in the afternoon. Weeks ago Lydia had managed to sell him on the class by stressing how important it would be to his spell craft that he understood Astronomy and the patterns of the cosmos. Her asking with wide pleading eyes didn’t hurt her case, either. So far, he was pretty sure the magic stuff was a dud but it wasn’t like the class was hurting his GPA. Even still, he squinted and tried to rearrange the position of the lines and stars based on what he thought she was going for. 

“What’s it supposed to look like?”

“The gravitational pull is wrong; it should look more like this.” She slid what was a loosely rendered sketch of what was on the chalk board with a few slight differences, it probably wouldn’t make other students take notice but Lydia was particular like that.

“Huh. Sort of looks like some early Meroïtic sigils I saw when we were searching for a way to stop that soul eater in the summer before senior year. Or you know, something Celtic but everything looks like that after a while.”

“Stiles. For the last time, the Horeux did not eat souls.”

-

So it turned out that a lot of Ivy League students were pretentious assholes, who would have guessed that those stereotypes came from somewhere. His own social ineptness was a given at this point and being known as the spastic kid who couldn’t stop fidgeting didn’t help make him many friends. So what if he often answered that he was majoring in Liberal Arts when the question was posed to him, it was a hell of a lot easier than trying to explain that he was triple majoring in Folklore, History, and Criminology – and no he wasn’t sure what he was going to do with that yet, thanks. And sure, Stiles had figured the dumb girl routine Lydia did in high school was an act a long time ago but he really hadn’t understood just how much of that was a defense mechanism until Registration Week and the afternoon they did not speak of. Even so, it sucked royally when surfer dude was picked over both Lydia and himself for the group projects. 

While the majority of students seemed comfortable eyeing Lydia with a great deal of unresolved lust and fear no one offered to be her partner and not for the first time did Stiles think about the real reason Lydia insisted they be in as many of the same classes as possible. 

Whatever, they’d just make their own group.

-

Let the record be set. Lydia is a card carrying MENSA member. That said; Stiles was still almost valedictorian of their graduating class. They work well together. As Stiles easily grasped connections others overlooked, Lydia was like a dog with a bone with a subject she found interesting. It didn’t hurt that Lydia liked to take command and threaten Stiles into focusing his high amount of energy on whatever tasks they needed to complete. 

They would have made the most perfect child together had things been different. Stiles didn’t like to admit it but he still had the occasional wistful thought of a tiny toddler with strawberry blonde hair who cured cancer and played at Carnegie Hall. Sometimes, he’d catch her gaze and saw a look on her face that he couldn’t quite express in words and wondered what it was she thought about.

-

Their project and accompanying paper was titled: Cosmological Patterning and Myth: The Effects of the Cosmological Design on Proto-Celtic Culture’s Myths and Practices by Lydia G. Martin and G. Stiles Stilinski.

-

It had a lot of fancy words but their project created a mathematical algorithm that looked at how stellar parallax of visible stars from ye’ olden times provided a baseline in what is now called the cosmic distance ladder which the super early Celtic cultures used in their constructions of the cosmos and later in their myths. 

Maybe. They were only freshman after all and it would take a while for the Department to agree with their findings before they passed it on to other boards for review, where it would be argued both for and against and picked apart by skeptics of all sorts, but Lydia seemed unfazed by it and so Stiles took his cue from her.

Until such a time, they have clubs and the occasional frat party to attend on the weekend and a coven of vampires to be exterminated the following night. Stiles had finally convinced Lydia to come with him and some of the drag queens from home to visit San Francisco for the annual SlutWalk. Still they keep themselves busy. On Wednesdays they’re invited to have tea with the local neighborhood witches, wiccans, and magick users. To cement their friendship, their bro-ship as it were, in turn for one night of listening to Stiles drunk and whining about unrequited love with certain bad boy alphas, Lydia demanded a shopping trip the day before they go back to Beacon Hills for a visit. They never mentioned what was said over the shots of Tequila when Lydia saw Jackson’s relationship status change on Facebook. Overall college was less Buffy like than Stiles had been expecting but it’s only Thanksgiving break of their first year. 

Surely, it’ll at least be junior year before they have to stop an apocalypse. Stiles would like to lose his virginity before then. 

-

Allison and Scott were apparently talking again although neither Stiles nor Lydia wanted to comment on that. Stiles saw the looks Issac tried to cover up when Scott talked about the possibility of Allison coming back to visit. 

Derek talked about finishing the back porch, improving on the house little by little, asked in convoluted way for Stiles to refresh the protection wards around the property. Derek sometimes watched Stiles like Stiles watched him, but Stiles knew it was still early going. They had time. Still, he enjoyed the sight of their alpha and knew that Lydia watched him watch Derek. 

Boyd complained about his hours still being part time and the flirty people he had to deal with as Derek refused to deal with customers. Issac talked about adding classes and werewolf training. It was still hard to talk about Erica.

When the conversation turned and Issac asked, it was Lydia who responded.  
“Nope. Nothing new with us,” Lydia said. 

Stiles lips spread wide, stories safely hidden behind his teeth.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading - I have a head canon of Stiles and Lydia being magick-using science bros who fight supernatural crime while at college ...and unbeknownst to the pack. I kind of love the idea of this verse and the many different directions it could go. I'm already tempted to flesh it out more. :P


End file.
